In many ways, Min’s novel feels of-the-moment, coming amid a push for more Asian American representation and after both the COVID-fueled surge of anti-Asian hate crimes and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that forced a reckoning with the sexual stereotyping of Asian women. But Min actually finished The Fetishist a decade ago — five years before her death of breast cancer at age 60. She hadn’t sought to publish the novel in her lifetime; her diagnosis marked a turn away from a long career in fiction, the high point of which was her 2006 debut novel Secondhand World, a finalist for the PEN-Bingham Award. Instead, she turned to writing essays, telling her daughter Kayla Min Andrews, “I need to spend the time I have left understanding myself, my life, and the world around me, unadorned.” A fiction writer herself, Min Andrews has brought this abandoned novel to publication, providing readers with her mother’s fiction-mediated understanding of the thorny experience of being objectified.
The Fetishist is indeed adorned — a prefatory author’s note tells us that “this is a fairy tale of sorts” featuring “a giant, a buried treasure (a tiny one), a hero held captive, a kind of ogre (a tiny one), and a sleeping beauty.” Min unspools the tale in short chapters, alternating her third-person omniscient narration primarily among Alma, Daniel, and Kyoko, whose perspectives we dip into and out of in moments of free indirect discourse befitting a Victorian novel. Long, winding sentences filled with wordplay unfold virtuosically, especially when Min writes about Alma and Daniel performing classical music and Kyoko screaming out her demons with her punk band. The plot also includes a slapstick murder attempt, two foiled suicides, a cross-country road trip, and ample flashbacks to a summer in Italy.
All of this framing is ultimately in service of bringing Daniel and Alma to separate and mutual grapplings with the “exultation, laced with contempt” that formed the foundation of their relationship. What makes The Fetishist remarkable in this regard is not just that Min puts pressure on Daniel to come to terms with his sense of entitlement over Asian women, but that she also prods Alma to examine her own complicated relationship to being fetishized.